Faster fiber. How to compete with 5G?

[dhamsher]

Hi. I love my gigabit fiber. But 5g is coming, and it will be faster. How to compete? Faster fiber! When will sonic offer faster fiber? 10GB?

[uberg]

What the hell are people doing where 1gbps isn't sufficient bandwidth?

[cmeisel]

5G may or may not be faster. In early tests with households it has shown to be slower for most people. And if people's hardware is a bottleneck now for a gig, these problems will get worst for 5g. There is little to no danger/chance that anybody will offer something with this speed to households anytime, anywhere in the US, 5G or no 5G.

[dhamsher]

@dane would love a response from sonic here.

[ewhac]

Hi. I love my gigabit fiber. But 5g is coming, and it will be faster. [ ... ]

No, it won't.

4G before it, and 3G before that, both promised blazing speeds, and indeed the earliest adopters enjoyed that for a few fleeting moments when there was no contention. Both of them turned into sludge, because the US phone companies did what they always do -- oversubscribed the infrastructure, leading to dropouts, excessive packet retries, and slow data transfers. And radio hasn't become any less fundamentally noisy.

Plus: Have you priced 10Gbit NICs and switches lately?

What the hell are people doing where 1gbps isn't sufficient bandwidth?

People using cloud backup services, for one.

[cmeisel]

@dane would love a response from sonic here.

Seems there is really nothing to answer for sonic’s ceo here. This is a non issue, 5g in homes is many years away and in almost all cases it will not beat fiber speeds and most certainly never for pricing in the same range. Never say never, 5g speeds faster than 1gb with unlimited bandwidth from cellular providers for $40-$100 will not happen in the next 10 years. Most hardware today can barely handle 1gb as Speedtests in this forum show. Nothing a fiber provider has to worry about and fiber can scale higher.

[rconti]

What the hell are people doing where 1gbps isn't sufficient bandwidth?

People using cloud backup services, for one.

On how many computers in a house? I use a couple of cloud backup providers, and can't come anywhere near saturating 1Gb doing a file-level backup, even from an SSD.

My NAS is certainly nowhere near that fast.

I'm not saying there aren't use cases, there certainly are, but I don't think "5th generation cellular networks (is there confusion here about what 5G means, I just realized as I wrote this?) prove that 1Gbps home connections are too slow".

[ewhac]

On how many computers in a house? I use a couple of cloud backup providers, and can't come anywhere near saturating 1Gb doing a file-level backup, even from an SSD.

That's almost certainly due to throttling on the cloud provider's side, in addition to network congestion between you and the backup server. I suspect that most cloud backup outfits have provisioned their servers to assume typical US residential connectivity, so when you waltz up with your 20-times-faster connection, they're not expecting it.

Even so, a modern HDD can easily spit out 150MB/sec sustained, and should have no trouble saturating a gigabit link.

My NAS is certainly nowhere near that fast.

Then you must have a cheesy NAS, or your LAN has issues. Not to turn this into a tech-measuring contest, but I easily saturate the network copying files to/from the CIFS shares on my FreeNAS box (unless it's a Windows client; then it only goes half as fast).